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Date:      Sat, 11 Jan 2014 14:04:00 +0100
From:      Thomas Steen Rasmussen <thomas@gibfest.dk>
To:        lev@FreeBSD.org
Cc:        net@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Merge ping+ping6 and traceroue+traceroute6 to single utilities?
Message-ID:  <52D14140.3090003@gibfest.dk>
In-Reply-To: <1063008459.20140111160525@serebryakov.spb.ru>
References:  <1063008459.20140111160525@serebryakov.spb.ru>

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On 11-01-2014 13:05, Lev Serebryakov wrote:
> Hello, Net.
>
>    Is here any project to merge ping/ping6 into ping and
> traceroute/traceroute6 into treaceroute? As IPv6 becomes more common these
> days, it is very inconvenient to have these utilities separated.
>
Hello,

I hope not, these should remain seperate, allow me to explain:

There is a good reason these utilities are seperated into v4 and
v6 specific versions, while other tools support both. The reason
is that ping and traceroute are network troubleshooting utilities
that are only used for verifying/testing network connectivity.

When testing network connectivity you are usually thinking about a
specific protocol. Having seperate versions of the tools removes the
ambiguity for hostnames with both A and AAAA records. If you want
to test v4, use ping, if you want to test v6, use ping6.

Normal network enabled utilities like telnet or ftp or nc support
both because when using those you usually don't care about the
address family used, you just want to connect. This is a significant
difference from using ping or traceroute where you almost always
want a specific address family, depending on what you are testing.


Make sense ?


Best regards

Thomas Steen Rasmussen



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